I am a good and loyal customer. If I receive a good product or service at a fair price from a retailer, vendor, or contractor, I keep coming back for more.
It’s called customer loyalty, and for enterprises that understand it, it may be the greatest dividend from investments made in solid customer service.
My last three cars have each been Kia Sportages, all three purchased at Bulldog Kia in Athens from the same salesman.
The service at that dealership began to decline rapidly, so I moved to Heyward Allen Toyota, also in Athens. From every indication, I will be there to stay.
Until very recently, I was with the same auto insurer for 38 years. In the early 2000s, we found an outstanding cleaning service, United Home Cleaning. In addition to expanding their use of more of their services, we regularly refer them to new customers.
Yet, strangely, I find that, month after month, if not week after week, fewer and fewer enterprises, large and small, seem to think customer service actually matters.
As a broke young TV reporter in Macon in 1984, I had over-bought myself a new sports car.
My monthly car payment and automotive insurance together cost a week’s pay and half my monthly income.
I had to find a more economical solution — and fast.
GEICO operated a huge call center in Macon and had just opened its first “customer-facing” independent agent office.
That agent, Jerry Sorrells, could not have been more customer-focused. He wrote me a policy for nearly half the cost I had been paying, and that began a 38-year relationship with the insurer.
Sorrells is still with GEICO, running his own shop in Cobb County now. Yet when my policy renewal arrived in July a few years ago, it proposed a 150% premium increase, while I was simultaneously dropping from three insured vehicles to only two.
Thinking there had to be an error, I made several calls to the company, spent hours on hold, was transferred from one department to another, and so on.
I explained that I was in my early 60s, not my 20s, that my last insurance claim had been in 1991 and that I had no moving violations of any kind in well over a decade. Generally, I was the type of customer they should want.
GEICO explained that “underwriting” was driving these premium increases, along with significant increases in medical claim expenses following a serious accident. I was also told that all of metro Atlanta was considered a “high-risk” market.
My calls got me nowhere, so in about six hours, I contacted three other insurers, received quotes with matching coverage, and moved to the insurer and broker currently handling my homeowners insurance — for a 50% reduction in my insurance premium.
Thus ended a 38-year customer relationship.
I subscribe to many newspapers, likely including the one you are now reading. The big guys seem to want only new subscribers, failing to appreciate longtime readers. Mobile phone, cable, and other media companies are always running great promotions for NEW customers while leaving out the loyal ones.
IF you have to BUY all your new customers with price cuts and promotions, those customers will only be with you until a competitor runs a better promotion.
It is called churn rate, and it is all about the high cost of customer acquisition.
As a small businessperson myself, I know all too well that the best customers are the customers you ALREADY HAVE. Seek more of their business. Do more of what you can do for them, because they already like and employ you.
There are still companies that understand this.
The list just seems to be getting shorter.
Chick-fil-A, which continually ranks among America’s favorite restaurant chains, puts customers only behind the quality of its products. Georgia Power is still known for being customer-focused, despite being a huge monopoly utility. And I will go one step further: Several of metro Atlanta’s newer municipalities, offering a city-lite model with high-touch customer service, at least seem to their new residents to really care.
And again, most small businesses already understand this model, recognizing the high costs of customer acquisition and the comparatively low costs of customer retention.
So this effort not only pays off, it makes a huge difference in customer satisfaction and new-customer referrals.
Happy customers, quite frankly, often reflect their happiness back on a business’s employees as well.
So, IF you consider yourself a smart consumer and want to spend your dollars wisely, REWARD those who reward and serve you well.
You will be very glad you did.